Such is, in the most general terms, the statement of what Christ does ‘for us’; and the question comes to be the all-important one for each, Do I let Him do it for me?  Remember the alternative.  There must either be condemnation for us, or for the sin that dwelleth in us.  There is no condemnation for them who are in Christ Jesus, because there is condemnation for the sin that dwells in them.  It must he slain, or it will slay us.  It must be cast out, or it will cast us out from God.  It must be separated from us, or it will separate us from Him.  We need not be condemned, but if it be not condemned, then we shall be.

THE WITNESS OF THE SPIRIT

   ’The Spirit itself beareth witness with our spirit,
   that we are the children of God.’—­ROMANS viii. 18.

The sin of the world is a false confidence, a careless, complacent taking for granted that a man is a Christian when he is not.  The fault, and sorrow, and weakness of the Church is a false diffidence, an anxious fear whether a man be a Christian when he is.  There are none so far away from false confidence as those who tremble lest they be cherishing it.  There are none so inextricably caught in its toils as those who are all unconscious of its existence and of their danger.  The two things, the false confidence and the false diffidence, are perhaps more akin to one another than they look at first sight.  Their opposites, at all events—­the true confidence, which is faith in Christ; and the true diffidence, which is utter distrust of myself—­are identical.  But there may sometimes be, and there often is, the combination of a real confidence and a false diffidence, the presence of faith, and the doubt whether it be present.  Many Christians go through life with this as the prevailing temper of their minds—­a doubt sometimes arising almost to agony, and sometimes dying down into passive patient acceptance of the condition as inevitable—­a doubt whether, after all, they be not, as they say, ‘deceiving themselves’; and in the perverse ingenuity with which that state of mind is constantly marked, they manage to distil for themselves a bitter vinegar of self-accusation out of grand words in the Bible, that were meant to afford them but the wine of gladness and of consolation.

Now this great text which I have ventured to take—­not with the idea that I can exalt it or say anything worthy of it, but simply in the hope of clearing away some misapprehensions—­is one that has often and often tortured the mind of Christians.  They say of themselves, ’I know nothing of any such evidence:  I am not conscious of any Spirit bearing witness with my spirit.’  Instead of looking to other sources to answer the question whether they are Christians or not—­and then, having answered it, thinking thus, ’That text asserts that all Christians have this witness, therefore certainly I have it in some shape or other,’